As is well known, pickup trucks are commonly used for hauling light cargo such as crates and boxes. Pickup truck beds are formed of floor and extending side walls and end walls, one of the latter being hinged to form a tailgate. In general, the volume cargo carrying capacity of the truck bed is limited by the height of the extending side walls and end walls.
One means for increasing the cargo capacity of pickup trucks including those having cavities formed in the side walls or corners thereof is to use a stake and rail assembly to increase the height of the extending side and end walls of the truck bed. The stake members of the of the assembly are dimensioned to fit within the cavities of the side walls or corners, when such cavities are present, and rails are then attached extending horizontally between the stakes. Many, if not all, of such stake and rail assemblies are homemade since, to the best of my knowledge, no adjustable "kit" exists that can be purchased and attached to a the relatively broad range of pickup truck beds currently in use.
Two common problems exist with most such homemade stake and rail assemblies. First, although the end wall extension that rides above the front end of the bed may be attached by bolts, fittings or otherwise to the side wall extensions, the end wall extension that rides over the tailgate portion of the bed is either not attached, only loosely attached, or held by a slide bolt or some similar arrangement to the side wall extensions. Thus when the truck is in motion, the wall extension over the tailgate tends to rattle. Second, it is not always desirable to have the entire stake and rail extension package mounted on the vehicle, for example, as when full access to the unextended bed of the truck is desired. In such a case, it becomes necessary to either find an "off-truck" location to store the rear wall extension that rides over the tailgate, or alternatively, to store the same in the bed of the truck either lying down or horizontally against the side of the truck. The latter storage technique uses valuable cargo space, allows the section to slide around in the bed, or provides another source of undesirable noise as the section moves about the bed. The former is inconvenient since the operator must return to the storage location in order to recover and reinstall the section.